4 out of 5 stars

The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.

If you are anything like me and have grown up (or allegedly grown up that is), with David Attenborough’s marvellous and sometimes magical documentaries on the world we live in, then you will probably be fascinated by the natural world like me. There are hundreds of books out there on nature and they vary from detailed academic tomes to books that tell a more personal story and how people have discovered how nature is a crutch that they have come to rely on.

And then there is this book, Utter, Earth.

It is unlike any other natural history book that I have ever read. It is a series of tongue-in-cheek essays about all manner of subjects from the naming of your progeny, to what happens when you rub a freshly plucked parrot with a poison frog, what the difference is between shoals and schools and which beetle can survive being run over. I particularly liked the final section of the book where Yuen expands his thoughts on all sorts of living creatures.

I really enjoyed the wired and strangely engaging read on the natural world. It is full of wry and humorous observations on the quirks and wonders on this planet we are on. Reading this is a easy way to collect the weird and wonderful facts that you can drop into conversations when people are least expecting it! It’s a great book.

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